~*~

"It's not fair to me. Have you sat down and thought about that? How it's so unfair to me. Me, who's loved no one else but him. Me, who's braved a happy face for every thousand fans who call me ugly, a , a . Me, who's been hidden to the world for so long, who's a villain to the eyes of millions. Me, who did nothing but love him, dream with him, wait for him, hide for him!”

Mizuhara was shouting so wildly in the confines of her suite. Her bloodshot eyes scared me, and I became scared that she would lose consciousness right then and there. If the trash on the floor was any indication, then she was thrice more wasted than Jiyong ever was tonight. I couldn’t believe that such petite woman was able to drink that much alcohol and get that much high.

So when she began to approach me as she shouted, it became my turn to step back.

“THIS IS SO GODDAMN UNFAIR TO ME, KIM TAEYEON! SO DON’T BE SUCH A BARGING IN MY ROOM ASKING ME HOW I BECAME LIKE THIS! YOU AND JIYONG, YOU ING DID THIS TO ME! THIS IS WHO I AM NOW -- THE OTHER WOMAN, THE EX-GIRLFRIEND, THE NOBODY. I AM BACK TO SQUARE ONE, EXACTLY AS HOW JIYONG FOUND ME AND SAVED ME. I’M A WRECK, A , AN ADDICT, A MESS,  A WOMAN THAT NO MAN WOULD EVER LOVE. NO MAN BUT KWON JIYONG, AND THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M DOING!”

She stopped walking just when we were a meter apart. Even closer, I smelled the stench of pot on her. In fact, I became scared that her proximity alone would be bad for my child’s health. Thankfully, she walked past me. When I turned around, I saw her heading for the living room bar, her back me.

"Jiyong’s just hurting as bad. He's suffering, he's also sacrificing, and all he asks is that you trust him and wait for him!” I muttered emotionally to her, yet she kept her back on me as she poured herself a drink. I could see through the night dress she wore. “So don't sleep with someone else, or be with anyone else, because you and him, you're meant to be. We've all been placed in such a difficult position, so what else can we do? Please just wait a little bit, and you'll stop hurting too."

For a moment, she ignored me, and began to drink the vodka she poured for herself. With no chaser to follow such shot, I was impressed at her uncanny ability to finish the drink without shaking or stopping. I came closer to her, slowly walking, afraid that she’d flip at the sound of my steps.

"And while I wait, like you ask me to, I'm left to watch from afar, seeing you kiss and be merry. Every night before I go to bed, all I can think of is how you two are sleeping on the same bed, talking, laughing, cuddling, making love. When I shop, or eat alone, I cry when I go home, because I remember how you're doing the same things together. I'm the pathetic one, I'm the loser, I'm the victim. Where am I in all this?"

That’s when she turned her head to look at me, and now her face was wet with tears. Her eyeshadow and eyeliner messed up her face, so that her tears were black. She poured another full shot and took more of the alcohol.

"You've loved each other for four years, sacrificed a lot to be together, and even if he made this mistake, he still loves you. What would it take to look beyond his mistake? For you to forgive him and just sit tight and wait for him? We both gave you our word, and we'll follow through for you!"

"Words are just words, Taeyeon. In the end, I can hold on to the promises until I die, but there's nothing that guarantees me anything, and I'm still going to hurt. You said you're bringing him back to me, you promised me that, you bowed me that. But like Jiyong's words, your words mean nothing. Absolutely nothing!"

"Even if they're just words, isn't it enough that they're words said by the man you love? You don't even have to believe my promises. Just believe his, because he means every bit of word he gave you! You and I know very well he'd die first than to break any of his promises, because Kwon Jiyong... he means what he says, and does what he says. You told me yourself, he's the kindest and most decent man we'd ever meet. So why are you losing faith like this?"

She chuckled so loud at my last set of statements. Then she laughed some more, like a crazed woman. Before turning around, she took two more shots, then laughed so openly once more. The sarcasm and bitterness coated such laughters, and I feared for her sanity more. Kiko was losing it, drowning in such toxic substances.

"What are you doing right now, Miss Kim? Tell me what you're doing right now?"

I had no answer to her question, and I found myself stepping back for her every step forward. She was still holding the half-empty Vodka bottle as she walked closer to me. She shook her head as she laughed, then began to drank straight from the bottle.

"You're begging me for something because of Kwon Jiyong. It's exactly what I did to you three months ago. Why? For him, we can eat our pride. For him, we can hurt like this. For him, we become pathetic, pitiful, beggars. For him we can do anything. Why? God why? What is it with Kwon Jiyong that he can make two women beg each other like this?"

Kiko took another gulp of the Vodka, and more than ever I wanted to take the bottle away from her. Yet I feared that she was ready to physically attack me if I touched her, and I feared for baby girl. So I kept my distance. I heard her laugh even louder, until her laughter became faint. Then, slowly the laughter and the sarcastic smile faded off her face. Now she was only looking at me so resentfully that her gazes pierced right through.

"Did he save you the way he saved me? Because he saved me. He saved me from myself. He saved me from the wreckage I put myself in. He loved me, accepted me, changed me, when no one else would."

She drank another bottle, before settling on the couch so carelessly. Even when rested, she just wouldn’t let go of the Vodka. I stayed rooted on the ground, unable to sit beside her. Afterall, I was uninvited. And I realized now that she was about to make a dialogue that did not require any answer for me. Her sarcasm and bitterness was gone, only to be replaced by an irrevocable sadness that emanated to me.

"I was a wreck, I ran away from home when I was 16. I turned my back on my parents and my sister, I braved Tokyo, stripped myself off my clothes just to have a living, became a model who bared my all. And in the process of making it on my own, I met the wrong people, gave my all to the wrong men, got addicted to all sorts of drugs, until I lost who I was.”

“That's when he saved me. That's why I love him with all of me."

Silence followed her story, and for every word she said, I found myself engaged, engulfed, taken to another world where I was an outsider watching such painful story transpire. I envisioned in my head how they met and fell in love, and the love story that was once so vague to me became vivid and clear. Suddenly, it was as if I have known their love all along just by the mere words that Mizuhara Kiko told me. Then, she chuckled bitterly again. With one more intake of alcohol, she looked up back at me.

"I warned you on your wedding day, remember? He's a great man -- kind, generous, responsible, caring, thoughtful, loving, selfless, sincere. The best. The greatest. Now that you've found out for yourself, do you understand me? If I took away from you the man who saved you from your ing miserable life, would your heart break the same way mine did?"

Kiko was challenging me with such a stare, as if it was her life goal to actually avenge herself. Yet I understood that pain. I lived that pain. I knew that pain. Why? How? When? I was confused myself as to why I could empathize with everything she was feeling. And surprising even myself, it seemed that the answer to her last questions was a big YES. Yes, my heart would break if she took Jiyong away.

What are you feeling, Kim Taeyeon? What is this? When did you start feeling like this? And more importantly, why and just how?

"I know I'm not the only one hurting. You sacrificed your career and reputation for that life in your stomach. Jiyong sacrificed me and our relationship. I sacrificed him. We all lost, we all sacrificed, we all hurt. In the end, who's fault is it that we're in this hell?"

With that, I heard a glass break, and this scared me. Looking for the source of the sound, I saw how the glass handle of the Vodka bottle she was holding crushed through the concrete table. Yet she didn’t even feel it break, and her grip remained so tight. I feared that it would hurt her, so I came to sit beside her, ignoring that I just sat on her neon green chiffon scarf. But she took the bottle away from my reach, drinking from the bottle again. Now the bottle was almost empty.

"Maybe yours, because you slept with someone else's man,” she told me, meeting my eyes once more, and smirking so bitterly. Then, she took another gulp at the bottle. It would soon empty out. "Maybe Jiyong's, because he cheated on me."

With one final drink at the broken Vodka bottle, Mizuhara Kiko has managed to empty it out. Then, she threw it away, hurting herself in the process. As her fingers bled, she muttered, "Maybe mine, because I sent him away that day."

Her last words caught me off guard, and I paid the most attention. She touched on the biggest question I ever asked rhetorically, to myself, and silently to Jiyong. I have never had the courage to ask my husband how he came to sleep with me on that January night, when everything and everyone said that he was a loyal one-woman man. She sent him away that day? Why? I became all the more curious, and now I watched Kiko close her eyes and lie her back on the couch. She would soon lose it. I watched her hand fiddling, shaking, maybe from tiredness or the high. Her golden bracelet with the letter J dangling on it glimmered against the light. I’ve seen Jiyong wear the same Cartier bracelet, only his had the letter K on it. I never ever thought K meant Kiko, as I always thought it was Kwon umma’s gift, and maybe K meant Kwon. But to see their identical bracelets with each other’s initial, I felt a surge of pain in my stomach.

Why did we go here baby girl? Umma’s just masochistic like this… Even with her eyes closed, Kiko began her self-litany, mumbling the words, and still silently crying. Her tears fell from her eyes out her temple as her head rested on the couch.

"Maybe it's really mine, because I pushed him away, tested him, hurt him, because I wasn't ready to marry him or give him a child. I told him my career was important… that my dad would kill me… that I was too young and too ambitious to settle down… So now, how can I even compete with you? You, who gave up your career. You, who gave up your freedom. You, who gave up the public's respect. You, who accepted his proposal and gave him a child. I can't compete with all that, because all I have are four years. Four damn years that amount to nothing if I couldn't even give him the only thing he ever truly wanted -- a family."

Finally, she opened her eyes, yet she just stared at the ceiling. Here I was, listening to her for almost half an hour now. I still didn’t positively know why I was here in the first place. I just begged her to give Jiyong a chance, and somehow I ended up listening to her heartaches, her millions words.

And I didn’t regret any of it. Because this night would be most instrumental for me to realize one such important truth in my life. Tonight would mark a turning point in my life.

"If I'm hurting him, I'm sorry. If my way of dealing with all this crap is hurting him, then I don't know how else to deal with it. I have my pride too, and I really don’t want to be a beggar. Because I'm already a loser as it is now that the man I love the most, my hero, my savior, married someone else."

She turned her head around and looked at me, still foggy and loopy. Her eyes were weighing her down, and she blinked slowly. I knew that Mizuhara Kiko would soon surrender to her tiredness. I was surprised that she still managed a chuckle. With a smirk on her face, she mumbled, "I said a lot of things, didn't I? Just…”

Then, she closed her eyes. Before falling unconscious, her last words to me were, “Kiss him good night for me."

~*~

"You've been awfully quiet in the flight, and I'm a little scared. Are we... okay?" Kwon Jiyong said from the driver’s seat.

We have reached Seoul, and his manager brought his car to the airport. From there, we drove on our own towards our home. But what he said was true, I had been awfully quiet since we left Paris.

"Of course, don't worry about me."

"Is it because... look... I'm sorry that I became so drunk--"

"No! The event, the concert, the after-party, they also tired me. We're okay, Jiyong, I promise.  just... I don't feel all that well. Baby girl's becoming heavier and heavier, and I'm not able to sleep well."

My response was not a lie altogether. In fact, all that I said were true, although I hid some of the true feelings I was harboring. On the morning that followed my cleansing conversation with an intoxicated Mizuhara Kiko, I woke up to an empty bed. Jiyong wasn’t on my side when my senses came back to me at 10 in the morning. I swore he was snoring so peacefully beside me at 3am when I came back from Kiko’s suite. Yet I woke up without him, and since then, I was not okay.

"We just passed 21 weeks. We're more than halfway there. I'm sorry that you're physically suffering, but just hold onto it, okay?" he gently muttered, holding my hand from my lap. I just forced and smile and replied, "Thank you."

I tried to be okay, even if the fact that Jiyong was gone from the bed that day haunted me. I looked for him everywhere, in the shower, in the living room, in the balcony, yet he was nowhere. And when he came back to the room, dressed up and showered up, bringing breakfast from the pastry shop, the disposition he had alone scared me. He came back so happy, so refreshed, so fine, even if he was just a pathetic mess the night before.

I knew he did not just come back from a pastry shop that morning. How could he have when the bracelet that was previously dangling a J pendant was now glimmering the letter K? Since I saw that bracelet while we were having breakfast, it had become difficult to breathe. The pain in my stomach worsened, and I knew it was baby girl punishing me. My heart… my chest… it became so heavy, so painful, that I didn’t understand just why it was questionable to have a free air passage for every time my eyes laid sight on that K pendant. It should have been J. He owned the J bracelet, not the K. I just saw that K pendant last night, and he wasn’t the one wearing it.

From that morning, until the time in our airport, and all throughout the flight, my mind was a mess, thinking and thinking of the possible ways on how Jiyong suddenly wore the K bracelet.

"Just remember that whatever you need, whatever you want, let me know and I'll do anything to give you that, okay?”

I could only stare outside and think through that morning. There was a nagging difficulty that I felt. It wasn’t just the difficulty to breathe, or to talk, or to walk. Everything became taxing, a challenge, just because at the back of my mind, I knew where Jiyong went for him to be gone beside me on our bed.

I  could hate him. I could blame him. I could resent him. Yet there was not even an inch in my limb, my body, not even any trace in my soul, to ever know how to hate him. How could I, when Kwon Jiyong saved me?

"Jiyong..."

"Yeah?"

"You're a hero, did you know?" I muttered softly, still looking outside. We were still halfway away from home, and I couldn’t imagine just how I can still manage to exist in the next minutes, when I would possibly learn the most painful story I would ever know.

"Huh? What a